Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Weekend getaway to Strasbourg

Zoli's parents visited us in July. As usually, we celebrated his Mom's birthday together and organized a surprise weekend getaway to the lovely city of Strasbourg for them. In the end, it was a pleasant surprise to all of us finding out that there was an International Food Festival in the old town, with great food & drinks to taste from various countries of Europe. Yameee! We could find here everything from Romanian 'mici' to Hungarian 'kurtoskalacs', Greek salad, Spanish tapas or Belgian beer (for Zoli's Dad). And, on top of everything, we had a delicious fruit-ice cream bowl we could not resist skipping:
From EUROPE - FRANCE -Strasbourg

We spent the rest of the weekend by walking around, climbing the tower of the Cathedral (to avoid ordering our dessert with a guilty conscience) and taking a pleasant boat trip around the old town.



In the evening, we visited the Summer Show, which is a 30-minute-water, light & fireworks show played daily in summer-time.

Visit our entire album on Strasbourg below:
From EUROPE - FRANCE -Strasbourg

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Just enjoying the summer...

It's almost one month since we last traveled out of Switzerland (in fact, Zurich), so it's probably time to give another sign of life about us... well, we are definitely not getting too bored at home. This year the summer started unusually hot, so we're just enjoying the great weather these days with a lot of barbecue at the Limmat:
From Hiking_Cycling_Fun
... or at our place:
From Various Zurich (Home)

... and waiting, with more or less patience ...  for many exciting things to happen: our parents to visit us soon; birthday-celebration and of course our three-week-backpacking tour in Asia this autumn.

Thursday, July 08, 2010

Work & walk in Madrid

Project work gives plenty of opportunity to travel, BUT: most of the time you don't get to choose the destination and working time is so long that you hardly have any time left for afterwork pleasures.

What makes it even more complicated in the world of logistics is that most of our facilities and offices are located in industrial areas, where it's not much to see - apart from cases, labels, walkie-riders and trucks ... which are of course all veeery interesting, but up to a certain limit ;-)) I was lucky enough this time to have an implementation project in Madrid, just when the summer kicked in (well, it was a pretty challenging one, but at least at the right location) so I took the weekend-work as an opportunity to visit Madrid together with Zoli, flying after me for couple of days... and tried to finish up work early enough to have some time left for sightseeing.

Then guess, what...? by the time we left the hotel, the weather got cold and rainy, so we started to look around for places to hide us from the bad weather, which wasn't too difficult in Madrid: one tapas bar next to each other, great atmposhere everywhere, people having fun on Saturday evening
- by drinking a Sangraia at 'the Mercato':
From EUROPE - SPAIN - Madrid
- or enjoying a Flamenco evening show: 
From EUROPE - SPAIN - Madrid
... like we did. Both of them.

Next day it was time to do some real sightseeing in the beautiful sunshine. We started  off at Plaza de Toros with a tour at the Madrid's famous bull fighting stadium:
From EUROPE - SPAIN - Madrid

... continuing our walk through the Plaza de Cibeles (where probably the soccer fans took their bath yesterday after beating the Germans out from the WC final)
From EUROPE - SPAIN - Madrid

... and through the 'Parque del Retiro', a huge and beautifully maintained park in the heart of the city, with a lot of green grass and playing areas, lake with rental boats, vendors selling drinks, snacks, balloon swords and ice cream.
From EUROPE - SPAIN - Madrid

This park is definitely one of the not-to-miss attractions of the city, besides the popular city sights like the Palacio Real or Plaza Mayor.

Madrid is a great place to visit with beautiful buildings & parks, great food and drinks and charming atmosphere. It is the type of place where you can really enjoy life and well worthwhile visiting.
You can find below our entire photo album on Madrid.
EUROPE - SPAIN - Madrid